Melange

So again the days have just mixed up themselves and gone too quickly. It is still chilly - cold that you just can't seem to shake. The sky now is a periwinkle blue, and I'm looking out of our bedroom window. The Pantheon glows in the distance, strange that a place for the dead seems so warm. The twinkling Tour Montparnasse looms, always out of place. It seems to never really be dark.

So earlier this week we visited Musee D'Orsay, again on a cold bitter day. We were happy to make it in after a bit of a wait. People are not exactly flocking to the jardins in this weather, so lines are getting longer at museums and shops more crowded. But D'Orsay is always worth the wait. Even on a sunless day the light coming in through all that glass is just lovely. So much space for all the work. Rachel is the perfect age to admire the Renoirs, asking about the little girls sitting just so, and also to study the ballerinas. Joshua is playing his cards a little closer to his chest, perhaps some of the larger narrative pieces held his interest. As much as you want to feel you are a little too jaded for the Gaugins and van Goghs, well, it just isn't possible.

Part of the museum, surprise, is under renovation, so a lot of work isn't out. Paris itself seems is under renovation -

So yesterday we went back to the art store in my hunt for mats and envelopes. Of course, the store was opening an hour late for the bank holiday. Beaumarchais was absolutely deserted but we walked up to Republique and found a bakery open, crammed with people, and bought apple tarts and ate them on our walk. No luck at the art store but we picked up more pencils and Rachel bought one of those small wooden mannequins. Then we carried on with our day. We went up to Montmartre to see Sacre Couer and I taught my children the art of choosing a place to eat that is three blocks back from the major tourist attraction. We found a warm place with lovely food except according to my offspring there was too much cheese...did I mention it was warm? We headed back out and waited in line to visit the church. It was, as always to me, a place of realignment, even in a crowd that you can't stand still in. We went around once, sat for a while, then went through a second time with the smoke from incense lingering in the air. I am always humbled by the people holding onto the foot of the virgin and praying, or kneeling at some altar or another, quite oblivious to any number of onlookers, or lighting candles to someone whose altar area has had little attention. I try to figure out why they are seeking this particular saint for adoration. In all religion seems much more visceral in europe and latin america.

In the evening we had a lovely dinner at someone's house. We were treated to the most amazing veal dish and homemade pear cake with chocolate. the pears had been covered in chocolate, frozen, then slipped into the batter before they could melt and become too much mixed in. Someone spends as much time as I do thinking about cake. The wine was continuous - and the children were in close company with twin boys who are Rachel's age. if only they could have all gone out and played soccer...

Today the saga of mats continued. A series of unfortunate events (ie backorders) prevented me from ordering from the company I use in the US...so I finally found a company in Germany. (I was not able to find a supplier in Paris.) So I called one office who said I had to talk to berlin, and Berlin did no answer the phone so I called back Kassel who said, oh, Berlin is not in until 12, so then I waited to call Berlin and talked to someone who said, no you have to order from Kassel, so I just started laughing. She quickly understood my problem and helped me place an order, but between my lack of languages and her underutilized english it took almost an hour to figure out the order. But how nice that she was willing to help and hung in there until we had the whole thing worked out. This is why sometimes we don't leave the house until 4:00...

Hole

So, picking up where we left off. I've been in a daze reading The English Patient of all things. Finished last night. How you pack a whole book into the last two sentences. We found these oranges in the market, some come wrapped in blue and red paper with a picture of woman on them. They peel like velvet, split unevenly. The interior ranges from a lemony yellow to a deep stained red (pigeon's blood?) and you think, wow, this is going to be a pretty good orange. You slip it into your mouth and if you've been distracted by anything it falls away. Like Sappho you lose your senses, become speechless. You could eat this orange for eternity. That's how I felt about this book.

So what makes a book come alive inside of you like this? For me, having some underlying intellectual structure ratchets things up a lot. And two things happened in this book: the author lets us know two things, how the book is going to play out, and where he gets his structure. In the first three paragraphs you think the the young woman making her way through an empty villa is going to end up in bed with a lover, and you quickly learn that instead she is attending a burn patient. Things will go as they say, poorly. The rest of the structure becomes apparent as characters keep mentioning Miles Davis and jazz and how sometimes you have an intro that clearly the musician doesn't want to let go of to get to the song part, called a burden, and then you see, oh, the writer set up the first half of the book as a burden...and on and on. And then, because he is brilliant, we have the added aspect of this being not just a novel of lovers but a novel of ideas about race and nationality. I am loathe to return this to the owner until I have my own copy.

And I thought just because I saw Ralph Fiennes acting in a equally brilliant adaptation that I didn't have to read the book.

But out of my head and back to Paris. Saturday we had croissants and chocolate at a neighborhood place and then visited the Red Wheelbarrow again, the lovely English language bookstore, my island of english populated with Aussies. It's like finding a vein. Just need it, just a little. Then I can get back to long lines to buy loaves of french bread and metro attendants demanding that I speak only in French and not understanding things I order on the menu.

We also had a proper brunch on Sunday at the Bonnes Soeurs, yes those kind of sisters, the ones with habits, for Mother's Day a holiday which we all seemed happy to downplay. The children made lovely drawings and photographs for me as well.

Monday involved errands, Tuesday Rach was sick, and it just gets colder each day. I will get to today tomorrow. D'Orsay. It deserves its own space not tossed with The English Patient like a salade.

Art et Artichokes

So on Thursday we had again errands - this time to Fed Ex which is conveniently located by all the major department stores. I was grateful that it was actually a Fed Ex office, with live persons who wanted to help. But like all things French, confusion reigned. All I had to do was type a few things in - but of course the keypad was French, meaning the letters are not distributed the same way and some of the keys are different. I had forgotten this. Decades of using an American keyboard meant that a two-minute task took 20. The kids just laughed at me - spelling everything with a Q then not being able to find the Q when I needed it. But eventually we finished, and I snuck in a few minutes of shoe shopping and found some ankle boots. It is, in short, really chilly here and I did not pack any of my 3 pair of boots.

In the afternoon we visited the Pompidou Centre and it is still butt ugly on the outside, but oh how beautiful inside, although the escalator overlooking the outdoors makes me stomach sick. The museum houses an incredible collection of modern and contemporary work, and I forget that I miss DC's museums and stopping in to see the Dubuffets and Kandinskys and Miros and Picassos. Lovely thing is that they have the wisdom here to skip the Motherwells. Apparently they never made it past the gravitational pull of DC.

Rachel cracked me up when she noted in her what's the big deal voice that the Ad Reinhardt black canvas and the Yves Klein blue canvas were both just rectangles with one color paint, one black, one blue - that they were just alike, practically. In one way you can't argue with that, but I had never put those two together in any part of my mind.

I also had to explain why on the other floor there were no normal paintings, and why the Guerilla Girrrls existed, and why having a neon flashing sign that alternatively spelled out HIP USA and ASS was in a museum.

Friday evening was date night, and Stephen and I stepped out to Mama Shelter which is way the heck out by Pere LaChaise. I think we were in need of something that looked like New York. I had some drink called the Brazilian Mule that involved lemon and ginger beer, then I had the most beautiful artichoke (and switched to wine, thank you) I have ever laid eyes on. Being the trendsetter, I noticed that people all over the room followed my lead and ordered one too. There is something deeply visceral and satisfying about eating an artichoke in public.

Oh Paris.

I know you're mad about me taking credit for all that warm weather, but do you really have to continue to take it out on all of us with this damp chill? Can't you get over it? For crying out loud I had to buy a jacket today. Pleather. We're cold here...

So yesterday (after two errands took over an hour) I thought we would explore Montorgueil but really it got to be too cold. We ended up eating bad pizza. We did check out St. Eustache however, and parts of Les Halles. We returned there today where I found the jacket. On sale. They are giving away winter clothes, on with the ankle cuff sandals, and as I said earlier - hold onto your hat - the blue jean shorts and black stockings. Mark my words you'll be seeing this on a college campus near you. In the evening we met friends for a drink at the CHilean bar where we want so badly for them to make better mohitos. Oh well. But we stopped at a bistro on rue des Tournelles where we felt quite welcome and cozy and had a lovely family dinner. When I feel less lazy I will find the receipt and post the name. For me, again with the duck. I can't help myself. And pears and ice cream. And Rachel discovered a charlotte. Yum. Stephen won with a seafood rissotto that was very light, almost like it was spun from the ocean air.

But today I did manage an educational moment, we returned to Jardin des Plantes and this time visited the Grand Gallery of Evolution and the special Dinosaur exhibit at the Natural History Museum. The Jardin itself grew from the King's Garden established in 1635 by Louis XIII, while the museum was established during the Revolution. The Grand Gallery of Evolution is in a beautiful setting, a space that binds the old with the new in both architecture and ways of displaying items from the natural world. For example the old idea of cases still exists, but they are pushed to the edges of the rooms and many are shown in modernized displays of texture and composition, rendering the subjects part of an aesthetic experience. Toward the middle of each floor the space for presentation is more open and the re-creations less pedagogic. There's just something very pleasing about the whole thing. I'm not sure if we took in all the ideas that corresponded with each level. I did come up with some fabulous ideas for windows and room dividers based on bottles with blue transparencies and jellyfish in them, and also those modernized cases with butterflies. I'll have to skip the locusts at my house.

So you can see how I was tired by the time we decided that winter jackets were now a must and how I might end up with a pleather jacket wanna-be.

Dreary Dreary Dreary

The dreary day matches our momentary expat mood. Our home state is experiencing the worst flooding in recorded history, and while there has only been a thunderstorm or two in our hometown, the major population centers of Nashville and Memphis are underwater. Normally this would not effect us so much, but we learned that Stephen's niece's fiancee's brother lost his life in the first hours of the flood, swept up in its wake. It is devastating: he leaves 2 children. Everyone hoped for a different outcome, a short circuited cellphone, something, the tragedy is very real and compounded with the difficulty if not impossibility of moving around Nashville. Our niece and her fiancee could not even fly into Nashville yesterday from their spring/summer working excursion to Connecticut. Our hearts are really broken for his family.

I can't begin to express how much you miss home when there is an emergency.

The weather turned here as well, dropping to 40 F and clouding over, so today was spent on expenses, email, phone calls and research. I did get out yesterday with the children, in the rain and rainbows, to shop at the street market (I am now calling it the market of ceaseless embarrassments as I stumble through not only my bad French but my increasingly prominent shyness) for cheese and sausage and beautiful beautiful fruit. (Foodies I made lovely porc chops with pears and mushrooms and a side of mango in the evening...not a normal combination but I made it seem perfectly normal.) During the afternoon we hit the Museum of Magic which is in our neighborhood. It was charming and homespun, with some interesting artifacts from the history of magic, things that people were cut in half within, boxes that made disembodied heads, optical illusions, magic lanterns, and it came complete with a "Spectacle" a magic performance which was alternatively delightful and creepy and involved, yes, sleight of hand. The kids bought some magic tricks and have been practicing...

Les Buttes

Skulls, Axe Cop, and Le Bon Marche

A reprise of Friday, the best day ever, but before please be informed that the only cultural imprint my children will have from their time in Pairs is Axe Cop, this from hanging out with the writer friend. SkeletonWitch exposure I didn't mind so much; Axe Cop however has become a obsession. Thanks Writer.

So yesterday we saw the coolest exhibit. It falls so effortlessly into my post post punkedness. It is called C'est La Vie - Vanaties de Carravage de Damien Hirst. Poor Damien, having to still be identified with a first name. It is at the lovely Maillol Musee in the 6th. In short, a history of death in art, with the focus on its representation by skulls. Among others it includes pieces by of course Caravagio and Hirst, Warhol, Basquait, Picasso, Sherri Levine, Felix Nadar, Braque, and Joel Peter Witkin. My favorite was a pirate skull by Piotr Uklanski.

Lunch was put together at Bon Marche. I know, I know, access to the delicacies of the world and we had ham sandwiches, again, and coconut cookies. But it is the experience of Bon Marche, n'est ce pa? Plus I was able to bring home olives and such for later.

Dinner was at La Souk, just Stephen and I. La Souk is a little piece of Morocco in the Bastille, ochre walls and spices and a teeny place to sit on the outer porch. We skipped apps and went straight in for the kill: I had duck tangine with figs, almonds, and apricots, and Stephen had tangine of lamb with pears. Pistache creme brulee for dessert, with perfumed coffee. A perfect meal since my favorite thing in the world of dinners is duck with any fruit and what fruit is more special than figs? Check Stephen's twitter for a pic, I'll post one later.

Today we went to the Parc des Buttes Chaumont - and what can I say, Paris never ceases to amaze. The Parc must be well-beloved, so many people there, picnicking and walking and hanging with families and lovers. A terrific view from the top and on one side a grotto with a waterfall. Can you invent this? It is a little fairyland in a metropolis. More later off to dinner. Trying the trendy hamburger place again.